Debian Weekly News - October 11th, 2000

Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian community.

Making bugs more manageable.
Adam Heath and Anthony Towns have been working on the bug tracking system
recently, and have implemented an
important
new feature. Bug reports can now have "tags" associated with them, to
allow the bugs to be categorized in various ways that should be useful for
developers who are trying to deal with large volumes of bug reports. Some
of the tags that can be used include "patch", "wontfix", "moreinfo",
"unreproducible", and "stable". It should be interesting to see in the next
few weeks how these tags effect the use of the BTS.

Several bugs in the bug tracking system itself have popped up
recently, including duplicated bug reports, and some bug reports that were
not sent to the maintainer (maintainers should check their bug list page on
the BTS web site). Adam Heath posted a
summary of
the status of these problems. He also talked about upcoming development
ideas for the BTS, and noted that "Yes, Debbugs activity is picking up
again. This is good."

Vladimir Vukicevic has managed to squeeze Debian onto Compaq's IPaq
handheld, and has written a
HOWTO describing the process. Aside from some missing information in
section 1.2.2, it looks fairly painless. It does require a compact flash
card be used with the IPaq for the root filesystem.

Will a lack of security support for Debian 2.1 harm Debian's future
growth? A few weeks ago the security team announced that they are phasing
out security support of Debian 2.1. This was discussed in a
recent Linux Weekly News, which
explored the possibility that commercial third parties such as Stormix and
Corel could take over such security support, but concluded that
"the commercial distributors are not filling in the Debian support
gap." They also predict that there is an audience for such fixes, and
state that Debian "is going to have to address the concerns that audience
has. One important component of that is to provide timely updates
for current and past releases. Currently, this need is not being met, and
that will affect Debian's future growth."" In the meantime, few
people asked the security team to continue to support Debian 2.1, and
a security hole in boa that exposes the contents of local
files has been fixed --
but only in Debian 2.2 and unstable. (Also, the security team has announced
that esound is not vulnerable
to a recently reported /tmp file race condition -- it was fixed back in
February.)

Should locale data be split out of large packages in some way? This
question first came up when KDE was added to Debian last month. KDE
includes nearly 50 kde-i18n-* packages, one for each support language.
Now glibc's maintainer is confronting the
same
problem: He'd like to let people avoid downloading and installing 20
megabytes of locale data that is currently contained in the locales and
i18ndata packages if they are only going to use one language. The obvious
solution is to split the packages as was done with KDE, but there are already
complaints about KDE's many i18n
packages; splitting each major package into 50 packages will not scale -- it
will make the package lists even more unwieldy to download and read through.
Some ideas are to dpkg support some form of
subpackages, or let dpkg be told
never
install files into certain directories, so even if all the locale data
has to be downloaded, one can choose to only install part of it. Neither
idea is perfect, and there is no resolution on this question yet.

Voting has begun on whether to remove non-free from the Debian
archive. This decision will be made in
two stages:
The
first ballot will determine which of two proposals is finally voted on.
Or, if you prefer, you can debate the
finer
points of Debian constitutional procedure, and argue about whether this
ballot should be retracted entirely. Most of us would
rather be
coding, so Debian Weekly News will not go into any more detail on this
issue until it is resolved.

Andover News profiles Ian Murdock,
father of Debian and also now of a baby girl (congrats, Ian and Deb!).
The article
provides some insights into Ian, and also some good quotes about Debian,
such as: "It's critical mass. I was Debian and eventually it grew beyond
that and other people became involved and at some point, I'm not sure when,
it took upon a life of its own. Like a living organism it's got it's own
survival instinct.".